Maika'i Makua kane (The Good Father)
by litsnez
Summary: A Colombian necktie for Father's Day: When an important player in the Hawaiian organized crime scene is found murdered, the Team must uncover the truth before Honolulu breaks into street level war. AU H50 Players: Whole Team, MomGarrett, The usual suspects, No Catherine AU Element(s): McKono, No softies in the Yakuza Third person POV: heavy on Kono's perspective
1. Chapter 1

**AU H50 **|| Players: Whole Team, MomGarrett, The usual suspects, No Catherine || AU Element(s): McKono, No softies in the Yakuza || Third person POV: heavy on Kono's perspective

**RATING **|| T

**PROMPT** || via text: "A Colombian necktie for Father's Day... Go!" -Sheldon Monsoon: One of my best friends and an outstanding writer with the sharpest of wits and about the most fertile imagination on planet Earth.

**CREDIT** || Thanks to SuperSEAL with whom I started running this as a collaboration before, a few posts in, it ran away with me instead. ;-)

* * *

There is a happy little song, which hypothesizes that the Man In The Moon smiles because he's in love with the Girl In The World. When the two are in harmony, all living stars agree that planets can be born of their synchronicity. It's a romantic notion, sure, but not a very realistic one. At least not to one of the six and a half billion biped souls trapped against The Girl.

It was true that Kono McGarrett was a bit of a romantic at heart, but she liked facts, cleaved to evidence and truth. And the truth was that she and the moon had spent a lot of time together over the past few years. She had seen so many nights when that buttery, chubby-cheeked orb looked down on paradise with a rotten grin that was much more 'curious meddler' than 'entranced lover.' It reminded her of a menacing child peering over the edge of a cardboard box holding some small wild thing it had captured and planned to poke at for his amusement later on.

A glowing night sky, on its own, had long since ceased to stir fantasy or whimsy in her. Moonlight had played Kono's near constant companion through five years of midnight investigations into the weird, the gruesome, and the just plain wrong. This sweltering July night was no different.

Hazy tentacles of moonlight reached down to grip the outskirts of Honolulu; their thin, luminous fingers kept at bay by the staccato strobe of blue on red. HPD was in full swing. The incandescent white flashes of an investigator's camera interrupted the night like Zeus's bolts, blotting out everything else and pulling momentary bright sheets of blindness over a macabre scene. The crime was murder and Kono, through some stroke of shit luck, was first on the scene from Five-0. There hadn't even been time to set up the obligatory canary crime scene tape yet.

Her legs stretched out before her in long, clean strides as she walked boldly toward the lead officer. She approached him like she belonged there because, well, she did. The horrendous nature of the crime made it Five-0's case. It had been a long time since hostility over jurisdictional turf had met her at a scene. Besides, the reporters hadn't arrived yet. Murder wasn't exactly newsworthy in that part of town. Officials could afford to be a little friendlier when they weren't busy thwarting a mob of rabid reporters with a nightstick and a single fragmented bone of information.

"Whatcha got for me, Pah," Kono asked in a low, pseudo-sleepy voice against the shoulder of the dark officer.

"Bad news. We've got ourselves an official turf war," he replied coolly. His posture and the sigh of resignation that followed said he believed it.

"Buck up, brah," she clapped him on the back with a half smile, "Shift's over at seven."

There was a rosy blush of exasperation that showed even beneath the coco brown of the newly appointed officer's ethnic skin. He hauled in a heavy breath of air, held it, the blew it out in a defeated gust, "You're not nearly as cute as you are pushy, Kono. It's getting easier to see what Duke means about you and too much time with the ol' ball and chain."

The brunette beamed up at his perturbation and waited patiently while she pulled on her black latex gloves.

"Ever heard of a Colombian Necktie?" Pah moved on.

"Throat slit, tongue threaded through the wound? Yeah, why? More of a Miami thing. We don't really see'em here." Kono's eyes were narrowed at the possibility.

Pah cut his eyes, "We do now."

"Ew." Kono looked him over, studied the barely restrained horror that tightened the skin around his black eyes, "Alright. I'll take a look. You call Max yet?"

The dapper young uniform rumbled back, "I called _everybody."_

Kono only nodded as she slipped around him and flicked the brilliant beam of her flashlight to life on her way down the path to certain gore. It was a narrow gap between a pair of too-close houses in one of the many seedy neighborhoods that dotted the island. The broader the light, the better to see discarded syringes, weapons, and bodies with. She liked to wear boots. Yes, even in July. It was just safer that way.

It was nothing in that area to run across a dirty, barefooted toddler alone on a sidewalk clothed only in a sagging diaper and a Kool-aid smile at two in the morning. Sure enough, a neglected, filthy tyke caught her eye at the other end of the alley-like stretch, just feet from the body. She shined the light out over him. "Shit," she muttered. "Pah?" she called behind her, "Can you get a uniform with this kid? We've got blood matted on... _his?_ feet." She sighed in a sad kind of resignation, "Kid's evidence."

There was a certain amount of courtesy every dead man earned just by virtue of the fact that he couldn't breathe any more; just because someone, somewhere would begin to learn to live without him in the morning. For this reason, Kono squatted as reverently as one could possibly do such a thing and leaned in to inspect the body. It was one of the most heinous, shocking things she'd ever seen.

* * *

The scene was nice and secure by the time she heard Chin's familiar baritone echo in the mouth of the alley. He was talking with a blue stripe. Street traffic had come to a standstill. Beyond the easy hum of her cousin's conversation, all Kono heard was homicide; an eery undercurrent of unnatural silence, the energy of fresh death and a dull mix of heavy car doors slamming, low purring, muttering voices (mostly male, all carefully clinical) and heels striking, thudding and shifting tiny bits of rock, glass and broken concrete beneath them.

Every homicide was different. Sometimes she got a wail as a woman recognized someone she knew or there might be a chorus of loud protests, a father, brother or friend in disbelief, but not this time. This time there was only homicide and the high, frail trickle of lyrical pleas as a Spanglish speaking mother implored Officer Pah to release her small son to her. Above it all there arose a singular sonancy she knew better than any other. It was the quick, springy cadence of her husband's stride, heavy boots crunching impatiently toward her.

Oh, and the yammering parrot at his elbow. Yep, that was pretty distinctive too.

Williams was trotting, as he often did, to keep up with McGarrett's longer stride. His palms faced the stars and fanned side to side accenting syllables as he chattered. "All I'm saying is how is it that a guy can be ready to launch a full assault by water _at all times_," his hands sliced the air as if that somehow made the point tangible, "and _not_ _ever_ be prepared to pay his own tab. Huh? You tell me, how's that possible?"

"I travel light, okay?" Steve offered with a dismissive shrug. "I'll get you next time."

"No. No, you will not get me next time because you never get me. In order to get me... you would have to be carrying a wallet, which you do not do because apparently you're traveling light. So there's no getting me, Steven. There's never any getting me."

"OKAY, I'm sorry I didn't bring my wallet!" The two stopped short ten feet from where Kono crouched over a corpse, looking on with that 'S_eriously, guys... right now?_' expression of hers.

The Commander stood straight and tall with his hands at his hips, the way a scolding mother hen's might be, and leaning ever so subtly over his partner. His wrists held back the two hemispheres of an army green button down like drapery ties over a grey t-shirt. His wife thought she noticed him pushing out his chest a little, which earned him an eye roll. 'Cause nothing says I apologize like puffing up.

The very tip of Steve's tongue ran between his lips once before he parted them to speak, "Thank you, Danny, okay, for paying my tab. You happy now? We good? 'Cause if you wanna keep bitching I can run across the street and find an ATM right now or we can focus on this crime scene, since we're here. What's it gonna be, huh?"

"Um, no, you can't just run across the street and get me my money because withdrawing cash from and ATM requires a debit card, which you do not have BECAUSE YOU FORGOT YOUR WALLET!"

"Guys!" Kono, who hadn't had a drop all night, was on the back end of a sixteen hour day and wholly unamused by the delay.

There was a brief, goofy kind of pause as Danny stopped and restarted his run-on rant a few times. He gave in with a hand gesture for Steve that said _go ahead_, but only an idiot would've believed the conversation was over.

As the men joined her, Kono looked up from her spot at the victim's waist, giving Steve a chin-up gesture of acknowledgement and a passing, "Howzit?" Husband and wife or just a couple of investigators hovered around a body, there really wasn't much one could say by way of greeting in the presence of that kind of horror.

Danny sidled up to the body immediately screwing up his face until he resembled Bootles, a skateboarding blonde Shar Pei that surfed concrete down at Waikiki. "Ooo, oh, what is..." His head reared back and he squinted as though looking directly into the carved gore might blind him. "That is just..."

"Sick," she finished soberly.

Fresh from a celebratory stint at the team's favorite post-case watering hole, the guys were conspicuously chewing gum. _Smooth_, Kono thought just before catching a stomach churning whiff of watermelon, her least favorite flavor. It reminded her of a long night years before filled with Pink Flamingo shooters, a slew of questionable decisions and a banging headache chaser the following morning. She felt just a little green for a split second there. Leave it to her strange island pragmatism to be sturdy in the face of evil's handiwork, but crumble before the power of watermelon Bubble Yum.

Squatting across from her, Five-0's fearless leader looked a little on the haggard side. His five o'clock shadow was looking less 'Sonny Crockett' and more 'Viggo Mortensen between jobs'; you know, when the actor took to sporting his pajamas at award ceremonies... The double stubble thing was a bit on the hippie side for a Naval reservist.

The overwhelmingly bright lights they brought in on nighttime scenes always bleached the abhorrent canvas and everyone and everything surrounding it to their palest, so it wasn't so much a sickly pallor as a nauseated expression that kept her eyes with Steve when he crouched. It was the rarity of the experience. How often did one get to see the king of emotional stuffiness break his steely crime scene composure? Not often enough to ignore it when it popped up.

"You good?" she asked quietly, her eyes darting to either side, as if it were possible that they weren't alone in the cramped space. "'Cause if you've had too much to be here..." No need to finish. The suggestion was enough. If Steve's condition were something more than simple disgust he'd do the right thing. She trusted that.

One cool look answered her question. She gave him plenty of time to check out the gruesome artistry at the neck. She'd already seen the whole show.

"We covered this in Academy, Colombian Necktie." She pointed while she explained, "Medellin Cartel special, slit the neck exactly under the jawline, pull the tongue through the wound. Pretty precision stuff. Max ought'a have a field day with this one."

"I've never heard of anything like this on the islands," he commented.

"Seen it anywhere else in your travels?" she asked, baiting him into her line of thought. "'Cause these aren't street level thug kills. Gang-bangers get bullets. You've gotta' be pretty special to earn this kind of execution and whoever did it knew how. See how clean the lines are under the bone?" Her voice dropped, barely above a whisper, "You can see white."

"No, Central and South America are Team FOUR out of Little Creek. We didn't get a lot of Colombian anything in the desert."

"Yeah, but stoning, I mean _stoning_ had to be a _big hit_, right?" Danny stood over them, hands in his pockets, and wearing a four-year-old's self-congratulating grin. Crappy jokes were often his way of dealing with horrible, mind-bending shit.

"So wrong, brah," Kono chided and turned back to the work at hand.

"It's hard to say for sure until Max cleans the body, but that looks like two separate cuts to me, a V." She held an imaginary blade in her very real grip and pressed it hard against her throat, "Under the ear, behind the jaw," she sliced downward, "and chin to hinge," she sliced up. "One insertion, two separate cuts. Unless he was drugged, he was moving. It'd be hard to do something this clean on a still target, but a squirmy one..."

"Drugging a man before killing him this way would defeat the point and there are these," Steve indicated the upturned knuckles of the hand between his knees. They were skinned and swollen, the joints of the ring finger and pinky scraped to the white meat.

She looked down. "My side's the same way."

"Yeah, so he struggled not to end up this way," the Commander concluded.

"Swelling says it was within the last couple of hours," she added.

From his higher vantage point, Danny had a fuller view of things. His head cocked to the right as he scrutinized the face and wounds. There was a faint scuffing sound as his weight shifted to his heels, his chest and stomach pushing forward to counterbalance. For Kono, the posture called to mind, Mick Jagger.

"Hey, uh, Steve? This guy look familiar to you?"

Steve sighed quietly, his face angled down as his hazely-blue eyes lifted to meet Kono's stare. "Yeah," he answered matter-of-factly and gestured to a distinctive scar on the back of the victim's hand. It was a light colored raised X with an off centered line of three misshapen dots behind it and one nearer to the fingers. "This is Hiro Noshimuri."


	2. Chapter 2

So that was news. Big, fat, ugly news with a hairy mole.

As Steve uttered the words Chin appeared over his shoulder all decked out in his workday finest, jeans and an aloha shirt. Kono thought the top was a little bright, heavy on the '_hey, look at me_' colors, but it was cheery and that was a change in Chin that she could live with. It had been sort of a rarity to see Chin Ho smile at all for a cluster of months and he had worn his heart on his sleeves, his chest and his back too. Nothing but taupes, blacks, greys and every shade of blue under the sun day after day; maybe it wasn't exactly art imitating life but his threads had reflected his sorrow. Lately he'd been seeing someone new and while it was good to find that the parenthesis at the corners of his mouth had survived his season of pain, their arrival lead to unfortunate wardrobe trouble as was often the case with men. The harder the straight ones tried, the more prone to seriously regrettable fashion malfunctions they seemed to be.

Kono remembered Malia had done great work toning down the single guy color scheme when she and Chin were together. The memory stuck in her throat, a lump of sadness so thick she could've choked. She swallowed that bitter thought and made a mental note to stop by his place and pick through his closet later in the week. Hell, she got paid on Thursday; maybe she'd leave a few, more subtle replacement items, something in hues not selected from the contents of a Fruity Pebbles box.

The unerringly calm detective gave her a smooth look, his usual crime scene fare, blank face, warm eyes just for his cousin. He greeted Steve and her with an easy slide right into the facts. "Looks like you've got a big one on your line cuz, Hiro Noshimuri. You okay?" Leave it to Chin to call her out on what everyone else was thinking but wouldn't get away with asking.

Her brows lifted a bit in the middle. "Never met'em before tonight. He and Adam weren't exactly close when we were dating."

Danny eyeballed the body from the head where he too now squatted giving a low whistle, "A shave this close, somebody was looking to start a war."

Steve looked up at him with an unhappy, knowing expression, "Yeah. Well, when the Yakuza catch wind of this, someone's gonna get their wish. Alright, we can't do anything else here without Max." He looked up and around, his gaze piercing even in the dim light of the city night. "We're going to need to contain this as much as we can."

Danny piped up, "I hate to burst your bubble but in a hood like this, that was shot before your cold friend here hit the ground. Look around you. Eyes everywhere. In my experience, eyes usually come with mouths and those muddy the waters for us."

There was a moment's pause as everyone considered that.

"Here's what I need," Steve started, "Kono, I want you on the ground. Start here and comb out. We need a weapon if we can find one. Danny, you're on the street with me. We'll cover the mother and the uh, witness. Chin, can you handle HPD? I need to know information is tight on their end."

Chin had been around, on (and off for a time) the local force long before any of his Five-0 teammates had entered the island game. He knew people that needed to be known and those who cleaved to their anonymity. He'd recognized the disembodied face straight away and all that it's brutal circumstance implied. "Already on it. Harry's put a gag on the department until we can notify the family, but uh... maybe it'd be best if Danny and I handled notification on this one," he offered delicately.

"No," Steve and Kono answered in tandem. There was a brief awkward break. Kono hated to feel all their eyes on her (one pair felt heavier than the others) but she was too damned stubborn to cave. "I dated him for a year and half. The least I can do is let him hear it from someone he knows... or knew. I'll go."

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Steve hedged moving on before his bullheaded bride could baulk.

She rose to her feet and whipped out her mini-tablet from its home in her waistband at the small of her back. "Let me know when Max's cleared the body and I'll go talk to Adam and Michael. I'm gonna finish the walk-thru, see if our killer left us anything to work with." With that, she turned to begin making her way slowly through the alley.

Chin stopped her, "Killers," he called out." She turned briefly. "This is pretty big work for one person no matter how skilled. Men far enough up the food chain to arrange a face-to-face with Hiro Noshimuri don't travel alone. We're looking for a team."

"Mahalo," she chirped, her expression softening with honest appreciation for his insight. She wasn't exactly a rookie anymore but Chin Ho was never really done training her either.

* * *

The Honolulu County Coroner was not a readily imposing man. At five feet, six inches, Max looked up to nearly everyone he met with the singular exception of Detective Williams. He didn't move with Chin or Kono's grace or possess the kind of commanding presence that Steve and Danny shared. What Max had was best described as character and that, he had in spades. Though his slacks were neatly pressed and his shirts always tucked in, though his shoes shined and his ties, when he wore them, hung just so, there was still something kind of frumpy about Bergman, some unique way of moving through his space in the world that made him seem a little off normal. In Kono's opinion, it was this off-beat approach to existence that made him a puff of fresh air in the middle of the stuffy atmosphere of homicide.

Max navigated a labyrinth of numbered yellow Versa-cones lit from within by bright little Evi Lites, which glowed brilliantly in the pitch darkness of the early morning hour. Each lit cone marked a drop or line of blood in his path, leaving little room for scene entry and exit.

Kono was down against the ground, flat on her belly, hair sweeping wide brush marks in the dirt, when Dr. Bergman approached with his case in hand. "Officer McGarrett," he addressed, pronouncing each syllable precisely, "it seems that you have chosen an unfortunate evening on which to wear white."

She was holding a compact, slimline flashlight in her teeth and shimmying deeper and deeper beneath the frame of one of two houses which formed the opening to the neighborhood alley. There were massive rectangular halogen lights on either end of her long body. They were directed beneath the house and she was stretching toward a knife with a gloved hand while trying her damnedest to avoid crawling entirely under the building.

She didn't look up, too close to her goal to be distracted. "Yeah," she huffed, "well, that's what I said, but apparently," her voice showed the strain as she stretched as far as she could to touch the heel of the knife with her fingertips, "I'm the only one of us... thin enough... to fit without damaging," one last wiggle, "the scene. Gotcha!" She plucked the weapon from the earth and the odd, patchy greenery under the structure, and pulled it into the night. A tiny gecko scrambled from the depths and over the officer's calf before disappearing into the alley.

Her face was all triumphant smile as she got to her knees and looked back over her shoulder toward Steve and Danny. "That, is a serious blade bradah. Whaddayou think, six inches? Eight?" She held it gingerly and gave it a twist as she stood and turned to reveal her front side completely covered in red-orange clay dust.

It was their eyes that made her look, the unmatched blues both dropping down to her legs, flaring wide then crinkling in mirth. She glanced down, and made a face. "Awesome," she grumbled then snarked, "I hate you both. Here's your weapon." She dropped the blade into an evidence bag and handed it off to Danny.

Max was first to answer. "I have found that a pre-soak for approximately forty-five minutes in a mixture of one tablespoon of Borax and one cup of purified water to be the best method for removing red clay from my favorite shirts though you may want to consider using one cap of bleach thoroughly blended into two cups water for your white pants. I use a cocktail shaker as it is a perfect device designed for even distribution of liquid contents with varying weight and density, though the size of the standard shaker only allows for mixture of one cup at a time."

The guys were snickering; Steve, behind an index finger sprouting from his balled up hand and crooked over his lips like that helped, and Danny, unabashed, swinging his head off to the side and throwing out a hand like he was presenting the Doctor to a nonexistent crowd and looking around for a reaction or applause.

Max seemed oblivious. "It is also very helpful to allow any damp fabric to dry fully and brush off as much of the soil as possible before soaking. I hang mine on a clothes line and beat them," he demonstrated his technique while he talked, "with a wooden bat for this reason. I have found it most effective..."

The baseball charade did them in. The guys were howling. Even Kono grinned, as she cut the Doctor off, "Thanks for the tip, Max. I was born here though. I know how to get dirt out of my clothes."

"Actually," he replied undeterred, "contrary to common misconception, Hawaii's soil is not technically dirt. It is a clay composite which gains its orange color from the high iron content in volcanic soil and oxidization, which over centuries..."

Chin walked up just as Kono was rolling her eyes and stepping forward to breeze past her chuckling twelve-year-old teammates, "I miss somethin'?"

Max simply stood in place looking like he was in the dark too.

Steve inched in a bit so he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Detective Kelly, the slopes and bulges of his muscular arms swelling where they crossed over his chest. With the laughter fading, he sported one of the only deep grins of the night as he eyed his wife's retreat, ground to crown and back again, with something between respect and a shadow of lust. The Commander leaned into Chin and quipped loudly enough to include her, "I always did have a thing for the dirty ones."

Chin Ho chuckled deep in his throat, dipping his head in a poor attempt at concealment, "Careful. That one's got a serious right cross."

"Yeah?" Steve asked in mock interest, eyes still with the woman, his voice a little raspy like the idea had piqued his interest.

"Oh yeah, brah. Real jawbreaker. Pilikia," Chin joked.

Danny pitched in, "Yeah, you don't want that kind'a trouble man. I hear her cousin's a real asshole. Overprotective."

Kono flipped them off without turning back but on the other side of her retreat the corners of her lips tugged gently north.

* * *

Steve McGarrett was not known to anyone for his outstanding affinity with children so it had been a bit of a surprise to most when he'd elected to handle their toddling, wiggling evidence trail in a diaper. What his wife knew was that she and he had talked about this kind of thing before and that he'd taken to heart her observation of Danny's gentle, fatherly approach to children. Danny was honestly great with babies and small kids, so great that it almost made Steve's horrible bedside manner unnoticeable. Almost.

It had taken time to decipher, but over the years Kono had come to believe that Steve's problem with children was, at its core, really the same issue he had with the rest of the world; trust. Kids were, by their very nature, unpredictable. To most of the not-so-type-A's out there this was one of the elements that made them precious but to a man trained by the Navy and Life to be a bit of an obsessive compulsive strategist this was a recipe for some Armageddon-level shit. It was the very definition of his nightmares; something innocent, wholly pure, just ignorant enough to be curious, just mobile enough to do something about it and entirely helpless meandering and snooping about his crime scene or his life. It unraveled him in a way Kono found to be as sad as it was amusing. He was trying to grow though, she could see that, and it made her prouder than any other of his accomplishments.

So the Bromancers were on baby detail, Danny trying to distract their toddler witness with a parade of faces, animal impressions and sounds so the tyke's tiny palm could be photographed and Steve slowly beginning to lose his patience with the irrepressible mother. Chin was doing the door-to-door routine, which wasn't going so well, while Kono worked a street side collection of neighbors too small to be called a crowd. The sudden sounds of a scuffle whipped Chin's head around and sent Kono running to help. By the time she could see what was happening, the emotional mother and Steve were in what had to be the loudest staring contest in history. She was screaming at Steve; reaching for her baby, straining against Danny who seemed to be wrapped around her like a full-body human straight jacket. At Danny's back, McGarrett yelled over her while he stood as a human shield between mother and child, the latter wailing in the arms of a female CSI.

"Stand down or I _will_ arrest you for obstruction of justice! Stand down, you understand me? Retírese! Le detendré!" His Spanish wasn't as good as his Mandarin but the Commander's point seemed clear enough.

As she came to the outskirts of the fray the Commander shouted, "Cuff'er, Kono!" With Danny's help, Kono peeled the woman's hands from his body one at a time, twisting them behind the mother's back and locking them into place. Two HPD officers dragged her to the back of a squad car.

"What was that?" Kono asked because apparently no one else was going to.

"CSI Hale here," Steve nodded at the woman holding the crying child just beyond his elbow, "was swabbing the kid's hand for DNA. She pulled a pair of tweezers out of her kit. She was gonna remove what looks like paper stuck to his foot but the mom went nuts. "

The child was screaming bloody murder, which, as it happened, was precisely what he was covered in. Steve was standing with his hands on his hips with one foot slightly forward, which nearly always served as a precursor to an exit. The Commander was in the first stage of a turn when Chin Ho spoke up, "Where'ya goin' brah?"

"Somewhere else," was the terse reply.

"Not with those shirts you're not." Chin's smirk was so pronounced it was audible in his answer. He indicated two faint brown-red smears on the front of McGarrett's shirts. Each stain followed the distinct marks of five short, chubby fingers. "Those're evidence now man."

"Wha..." Steve looked down, pulling at the fabric when he doubted what he could clearly see, "shit. This was my last clean pair." He generally kept backup clothes in his office at HQ, tucked beneath the bench seat of the Silverado and pretty much anywhere else he could get away with. He was sort of prone to messes. On this day however, he had used his backup t-shirt/button down combo before lunch after a foot chase had ended in a grassy tumble. So the clothes on his back had to come off but he was at a loss for a replacement. The world could suffer far greater travesties than a shirtless Steve, at least that's what Kono thought. The merrily strangled look on CSI Hale's face as he stripped away his top layer said she was on-board with that train of thought as well.

Kono was smiling crookedly when she offered him a pass. "Boss, if you wanna head on home we can wrap things up h..." Kono's voice trailed off with the hairpin curve of her thoughts.

Her lips curled into a crooked half-smile and her eyes narrowed. She flashed her index finger at her especially ill tempered husband. "Actually, I think I've got something you can wear in the car. Hang on."

Kono spun on her heel, threw a conspiratory look at Chin and jogged to the Cruze. While she pilfered through the trunk Chin bagged McGarrett's shirts, labeled them and handed them off for the evidence box. Somewhere in the middle of the process he offered Steve as much condolence as he was going to get out of the Five-0 peanut gallery. It came with a mournful expression followed up by, "This grey one was a nice shirt too. You buy this for Kono to see you in or did she buy it for you?" He was grinning like the snacky cat with a mouthful of canary.

His cousin bounded up carrying a wadded up ball of banana yellow cotton t-shirt and a simper. "Evidence can hang onto that one as long as they like. Doris bought it," she explained with a dismissive tilt of her head. It was actually a pretty nice shirt, pricy too. It fit Steve well, she thought, and had she seen it herself, Kono might have picked it up for him. While she didn't like to let her petty show, the Doris shirt was certainly no loss to the daughter-in-law. Besides, she was in the company of family. What was a little snark among ohana?

Kono tossed the awful yellow number to Steve and watched him open it up. Her eyes danced as it unraveled revealing something too tight and a little too short for Steve's long midriff. It wouldn't be a belly shirt but it was going to be a really, really snug fit. Steve flashed her a doubtful face.

"What? Danny left it once when I was giving him and Grace some wave riding pointers." It was her turn to bite back her laughter. "Don't look at me like that brah," she answered Steve's face. "We'll change after we're done here. No big," she shrugged and gave him her back because seriously, she couldn't take anymore. Another second of Steve's sourpuss face and she was going to explode.

She smiled around her parting words, "I'm gonna help with the kid," and left the men standing in her orange dust.

* * *

True to her word, she assisted in documenting and clearing the child. CSI Hale did manage to peel that scrap of paper stuck to the baby's bare foot. Tacky and stained through with blood and rusty clay, it was too early to say without some special treatment at the lab but the torn paper appeared to carry Japanese script scrawled in a narrow hand in neat rows. It was too watery for Steve to make out anything when asked. Their best hope was Charlie Fong.

Chin covered the family, reviewing statements and covering the house for stray evidence. Max handled the body and the team finished off their scene as best as they could for the night. An hour or so after Max's departure, Steve threw Danny his keys and headed for home at the helm of the Cruze. Kono had never been so chipper about riding shotgun in the SEAL mobile as she was in her own car, but then she'd never hitched a ride with Big Bird and his very bright, constricting mini shirt either. She didn't say a word about it, but did hum a few bars from Yellow Submarine a time or two before they pulled into their drive.

Her levity was soon replaced with a kind of exhausted mental frustration as she spotted Doris' car in the driveway. She sighed. "What is she doing here right now? I mean, is she listening to HPD scanners now so she'll know when we're gone?" She rolled her eyes as she turned to the Commander, "You do know she's probably in there replacing my birth control with candy or snuffing out the pilot light on the stove, right?"

"We have got to get a better lock... something to keep uninvited CIA operatives out," Steve mused.

Kono only stared blankly ahead at the back of Doris' ride and wondered aloud, "What kind of lock would _that_ be? I mean, we could install retinal scanners, I guess, but it would only cost every penny of your dad's life insurance and leave one of us in an eye patch. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that one would be me."

Sometimes she laughed at her own jokes because she thought they were funny and sometimes it was just because they were so true and there wasn't a damned thing to do about them.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve all decked out in yellow and unfolding himself from the red Cruze called to mind a traffic light, one of those _watch your ass 'cause you're on your own at this intersection_ numbers one often found eternally flashing in the more rural mountain towns. It seemed fitting that a man like that ought to come with some kind of cautionary symbol or other. In fact, maybe the whole Team could use a set, little addendums to their badges that they tacked onto the bottoms the way chain grocery store employees advertised their years in service and in-store accreditations:

Steve McGarrett, _Intensity Specialist_ | _Keep your eyes at twelve and your six out of my way._

Danny Williams, _Hostility Technician_ | _Snark Czar_

Chin Ho Kelly, _Still & Deep Waters Tactician _| _Fully Accredited Secretly Seething Badass_

Kono Kalakaua McGarrett, _Locked & Loaded _|_ Pragmatism Practitioner  
_

On the other hand, why give the baddies the advantage of forewarning? Sometimes a guy stupid or desperate enough to grab the bull deserved the horns. Whether or not he could handle them was his own damned problem.

As these sort of things went, Kono was fairly adept at dealing with bull, both beast and byproduct. She had a way of assessing a personality and swiftly dividing the necessary from the evil. Her mother-in-law was a special case however. Doris McGarrett flew her freak flag a little too flippantly for the native's taste. While Kono was no stickler for the rules, she was Hawaiian born and bred and that meant she placed an extremely high value on family, both ohana and hanai. That was only the tip of the contention churning between the two, but considering the deep spiritual significance of ancestry, relationships and love in Hawaiian culture, it was a damned good start.

Kono wasn't really known for her attitude of forbearance toward those she saw as traitors, certainly not when the perceived treachery hurt someone she loved. It was something about her that Malia Waincroft grew to know well in her years between wearing the Kelly name. Though the young officer had been wrong about Malia in the end, it had taught her very little in the way of reserving judgment. The island romance with the notion of ohana was too powerful a thing to be undermined by one experience, no matter how thorough the lesson.

To Kono ohana was sacred and the McGarrett matriarch had done unspeakable wrongs to hers in the name of so-called love. While the past was something Steve's wife could forgive, what she wasn't willing to give Doris a pass on was the continued pattern of lies and subversion, sneaking and side-stepping and an overall persistent selfishness that Kono found contemptible. None of this was unforgivable but the ways in which Doris' self-serving conduct and posture cut Steve to the marrow were.

There was always a heaviness between the two women. Despite near constant smiles and tireless attempts on Doris' part to win Kono's trust or civility at the least, the bull-headed Kevlar cutie wouldn't budge. She treated Steve's mother like a mangy, stray cat that kept jumping the fence and shitting in the flowerbeds. She was a nuisance. Though the younger woman never began or engaged in direct conflict with her mother-in-law (elders were given their place regardless of mistake or folly) she wasn't cordial and she definitely didn't do anything to make her feel welcome. Kono, an otherwise friendly and easygoing spirit, was just hardhearted where family protection was concerned. In a way, the deck had been stacked by ill reputation against Doris before she'd ever begun to play.

* * *

"Stay back," the Commander rasped under his breath. Yeah, like Kono had never been through a break-in before.

She followed Steve toward the door, rolling her eyes when he reached toward his holster. It wasn't that they hadn't had more than their share of unwelcome and unhappy guests, and yes, Doris had brought an unwanted stranger or two into the house without warning, but this frienemy Kono knew far too well to worry about anything as obvious as gunfire. No, if Doris had crazy up her sleeve that morning Kono guessed it would come in some far more creative form. Like her or not, the junior had to give the senior her props. She was one crafty bitch but she wasn't going to knowingly put Steve in harm's way. At least that's what Kono believed in her heart.

"Kama, put that thing away," she scolded somewhat lightheartedly because a pistol was one thing, but seriously, he could never truly put away the SEAL; the military man thing was good and stuck, all swinging out in the open for everyone to see.

A secret, teensy weensy smidgen of her head was just fine with Steve drawing down on his mother. The rest of her worried what that might do to his psyche... and the wallpaper. Okay, not really but she wasn't a fan of what dealing with his mother's BS did to him and wasn't going to pretend it was alright either. Steve seemed little concerned with any of it, ignoring her reproach and flashing secret SEAL fingers at her like he was leading a team in on a rescue attempt in downtown Fallujah. Apparently he felt that surprise was of the essence. Overreact much?

It was kind of hard to decide sometimes whether to think he was a little nuts or just be sad that he'd survived the kind of life that'd taught him to react this way. It was a debate that would certainly wait as Kono pushed past the Commander pulling her keys from her pocket where they'd been cutting off circulation anyway. They jangled loudly, tiny defunct wind chimes ringing in the night to announce their arrival. She wasn't exactly quiet about cramming the house key into the lock either. The big hand that flashed out and wrapped suddenly and firmly around her forearm as she began to twist said Steve wasn't real thrilled about her choice to brush off his mother's little break-in. For real though, Kono was over it, over Doris, over the CIA specialty home invasions, over the mother and son arguments that only served to grant Mommy Dearest the attention she sought in the first place. The officer gave him a leveling look and pushed the door open anyway, his hand hanging on for the follow-thru. She wasn't going to be timid about coming home at night because his mother had some mental health issues to sort out. It just wasn't going to happen. If she let Doris inside her head it would only lead to the kind of paranoia Steve lived with and that wasn't something Kono was willing to allow.

He barreled past her and she watched him move soundlessly through the living room and hit the office like cannon fire when he found Doris sitting casually at his father's old desk. She wore a composed demeanor riddled with lies. Kono left him calling his mother out in a high-pitched, exasperated teenager's voice he only used with the senior Mrs. McGarrett, "Mom! It's two-thirty in the morning. What the hell are you doing here? Are you alone?"

"Of course I'm alone honey, it's two-thirty in the morning. Put that thing away and I'll make you a snack," Kono could hear their 'visitor' saying offhandedly. "Where's Kono? I'll get her something too. She's always hungry." She sounded so friendly about it, real snicker-doodles and lemonade, soccer mom fare. _Arsenic and watercress on toastpoints anyone?_

Though Steve was all over his Commander McGarrett game that night, Kono was finding it difficult to bite back her cynicism. It was the knitted brows and hard set mouth in combination with the goofy shirt that did her in. She couldn't help thinking he looked like an Angry Bird... or this stuffed pineapple she'd seen once in a gift shop downtown that danced and sang whenever someone walked by. It was a tough call between the two. Either way, she didn't have what it would have taken to witness the McGarrett family battle royale without smarming her way right up in the middle of it, so she detoured at the mouth of the office and headed upstairs for a rinse. It was like her uncle had always told her, it was fun to visit the circus every once in a while to see the clowns and the tigers and ride a couple of rides, but that didn't make it a good idea to join up.

"No one's hungry, Mom. We're on a case right now, okay? Why are you here?"

"Okay, so you're working, doesn't mean you can't get hungry. My washer's broken. I came over here to use yours... though maybe I should have done a load of your things instead. What are you wearing?"

Kono's attention was momentarily diverted by the poetic cruelty of a son with pistol in hand, staring down at the mother whose shit choices and lies had cost him a father right there in that same room by bullet. The good news, if any could be found, was that there was a conspicuous humor threaded like a ribbon all through the tense circumstance. To be honest it was tough to take a man dressed like a dandelion all that seriously even if his churlish and overall swagger did cast a kind of automatic dominion over all he saw.

"Esss'nothing, look, how'd you get in here, huh?"

"The key under the rock in the big sago palm by the door."

"There's not a key outside, Mom. You don't put in a home security system and leave a key by the door!"

"It's not your key. I put it there," she was breezing past him nonchalantly, "in case I ever needed to get in. What do you want on your ice cream?"

"I don't want to eat, Mom, I want to know how did you get a key and how'd you get past the security system to my house!" Halfway up the stairs now, Kono could practically hear him pinching the bridge of his nose between the eyes. "You know what? Never mind. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Just... don't do this again. And give me back my key. However you got it."

"Okay, okay, Mister Safety Patrol... I'll give it back. No more late nights, cross my heart."

"And what, hope to die?" Steve scoffed. "Been there. It wasn't that great."

Kono disappeared into the bedroom and let the door click quietly behind her.


End file.
